Current standards for exchanging transactional information (e.g., the Open Financial Exchange (OFX), a framework for exchanging financial transactional data and instructions between customers and their financial institutions) do not support the capability to obtain detailed transactional information associated with users. That is, while aggregate-level transactional information may be accessible (e.g., a payment amount of a transaction), transaction details (e.g., line items purchased) are typically unavailable.
In addition, current standards for exchanging financial transactional data typically require point-to-point connections, which grow proportionally with the number of participating organizations, thereby creating bottlenecks. For example, while a point-to-point architecture may be sufficient to support a user's interactions with a few financial institutions, when the architecture is opened to an arbitrary number of service providers, a point-to-point architecture may become unwieldy. Furthermore, substantial overhead may be required to authenticate numerous participants and maintain participant accounts.
Accessing detailed transactional information associated with users is typically based on a “pull” model driven by explicit requests (e.g., to financial institutions). The detailed transactions may be dispersed across multiple service providers, and it may be difficult or impossible to collect such detailed transactions in a timely manner. This difficulty hinders access to detailed transaction information, which could be used to support analytics and insights.